It Still Stings: Haunted Was a Great Companion Series to Buffy—Until UPN Cancelled it After 7 Weeks

The series made for a great one-two punch alongside Buffy, showing the breadth of the genre and the way it could be interpreted. Plus, if nothing else, Fox certainly stayed true to the ethos of the show. Haunted is still plenty scary, even two decades later.

The show ran for just seven episodes in a block with Buffy’s final season before UPN pulled the plug due to low ratings, leaving the series’ final four episodes unaired for years until the series was picked up for syndication by Chiller and the Sci Fi Channel for sporadic re-runs from 2007-2009, with the full series finally landing a DVD release in 2010 (it eventually found its way to Blu-Ray in 2018, too).

But taken as a complete package, that all-too-brief, 11-episode run of Haunted was one of the best little horror shows of the early 2000s you probably didn’t see. Fox is bringing it all, showing the leading man charisma that will make him a household name a few years later on Lost. The supporting cast is also solid, with a young Russell Hornsby (who would go on to be a fan favorite in NBC’s Grimm a few years later) as Frank’s friend and former partner, along with Lynn Collins (X-Men: Origins, John Carter) as his ex-wife rounding out the ensemble.

Though the creepy case-of-the-week format keeps the story moving along, Frank is also still reeling from the loss of his young son, who was kidnapped and never found, which provides a narrative throughline as he finds himself trying to keep a grasp on reality as ghosts and spirits tear his sanity apart week-by-week. Once this world gets space to breathe a few episodes in, and you get a feel for the format and pace, it’s extremely compelling. The show was truly hitting its stride at the end, stretching the format and digging into Frank’s story and the types of horror stories it could tell.

Behind the scenes, the show also had an interesting pedigree, which might help explain how it pulls off the horror chops so well on a tight budget. The series was co-created by Rich Ramage, who doesn’t have many credits to his name, but did write the screenplay for the cult hit 1999 horror flick Stigmata (a weird, freaky little religious-tinged horror story). Ramage was joined by fellow co-creator Andrew Cosby, a comic writer who also created Syfy’s hit sci-fi comedy Eureka. Though the projects are worlds apart, both shows do a great job of storytelling and world-building, and that’s clearly a skill set Cosby brought in spades. 

Though it never managed to catch on, typically pulling less than half of Buffy’s ratings during its run before being axed from the schedule, it’s fun to imagine a world where Haunted might’ve found an audience and went on to anchor a post-Buffy horror block at UPN. Had the show succeeded, it likely would’ve kept Fox too busy to land that Lost role. It also might have helped keep horror programming on the broadcast dial in the early 2000s, when instead the genre found itself in a bit of a dearth after the end of shows like Buffy and The X-Files in the early aughts.

It’s also fairly clear the creators never had a chance to really tell Frank’s story to a fitting end, with the episode order chopped at 11 once the show was canceled. But thankfully, its case-of-the-week style isn’t all that hurt by an open-ended, makeshift finale. It means Frank might still be out there, helping solve cases one spine-tingling ghost scare at a time. So if you’re looking for some early aughts terror, you could do far worse than tracking this set down on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Trent Moore is a recovering print journalist, and freelance editor and writer with bylines at lots of places. He likes to find the sweet spot where pop culture crosses over with everything else. Follow him at @trentlmoore on Twitter.

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